v Power Is the Great Motivator
v Most HBR articles on motivation speak to managers about
the people whose work they oversee. Curiously, the writers assume that the
motivation of managers themselves—that is to say, of our readers—is so well
aligned with organizational goals that it needs no examination. David
McClelland and his colleague David Burnham knew better.
v They found that managers fall into three motivational
groups. Those in the first, affiliative managers, need to be liked more than
they need to get things done. Their decisions are aimed at increasing their own
popularity rather than promoting the goals of the organization. Managers
motivated by the need to achieve—the second group—aren’t worried about what
people think of them. They focus on setting goals and reaching them, but they
put their own achievement and recognition first. Those in the third
group—institutional managers—are interested above all in power. Recognizing
that you get things done inside organizations only if you can influence the
people around you, they focus on building power through influence rather than
through their own individual achievement. People in this third group are the
most effective, and their direct reports have a greater sense of
responsibility, see organizational goals more clearly, and exhibit more team
spirit.
v What makes or motivates a good manager? The question is
enormous in scope. Some people might say that a good manager is one who is
successful—and by now most business researchers and businesspeople know what
motivates people who successfully run their own small businesses. The key to
their success has turned out to be what psychologists call the need for
achievement, the desire to do something better or more efficiently than it has
been done before. Any number of books and articles summarize research studies
explaining how the achievement motive is necessary for a person to attain
success.
v But what has achievement motivation got to do with good
management? There is no reason on theoretical grounds why a person who has a
strong need to be more efficient should make a good manager. While it sounds as
if everyone ought to have the need to achieve, in fact, as psychologists define
and measure achievement motivation, the need to achieve leads people to behave
in ways that do not necessarily engender good management.
v For one thing, because they focus on personal
improvement, achievement-motivated people want to do things themselves. For
another, they want concrete short-term feedback on their performance so that
they can tell how well they are doing. Yet managers, particularly in large,
complex organizations, cannot perform by themselves all the tasks necessary for
success. They must manage others to perform for the organization. And they must
be willing to do without immediate and personal feedback since tasks are spread
among many people.
v The manager’s job seems to call more for someone who can
influence people than for someone who does things better alone. In motivational
terms, then, we might expect the successful manager to have a greater need for
power than a need to achieve. But there must be other qualities besides the
need for power that go into the makeup of a good manager. We will discuss here
just what these qualities are and how they interrelate.
v To measure the motivations of managers, we studied a
number of individuals in different large U.S. corporations who were
participating in management workshops designed to improve their managerial
effectiveness. (See the sidebar “Workshop Techniques.”) We concluded that the
top manager of a company must possess a high need for power—that is, a concern
for influencing people. However, this need must be disciplined and controlled
so that it is directed toward the benefit of the institution as a whole and not
toward the manager’s personal aggrandizement. Moreover, the top manager’s need
for power ought to be greater than his or her need to be liked.
v Workshop
Techniques
v Read
More
v
Power without discipline
is often directed toward the manager’s personal aggrandizement, not toward the
benefit of the institution.
v Measuring
Managerial Effectiveness
v What does it mean when we say that a good manager has a
greater need for power than for achievement? Consider the case of Ken Briggs, a
sales manager in a large U.S. corporation who joined one of our managerial
workshops. (The names and details of all the cases that follow have been
disguised.) About six years ago, Ken Briggs was promoted to a managerial
position at headquarters, where he was responsible for sales-people who
serviced his company’s largest accounts.
v In filling out his questionnaire at the workshop, Ken
showed that he correctly perceived what his job required of him—namely, that he
should influence others’ success more than achieve new goals himself or
socialize with his subordinates. However, when asked, with other members of the
workshop, to write a story depicting a managerial situation, Ken unwittingly
revealed through his fiction that he did not share those concerns. Indeed, he
discovered that his need for achievement was very high—in fact, higher than the
90th percentile—and his need for power was very low, in about the 15th
percentile. Ken’s high need to achieve was no surprise—after all, he had been a
very successful salesman—but obviously, his desire to influence others was much
less than his job required. Ken was a little disturbed but thought that perhaps
the measuring instruments were not accurate and that the gap between the ideal
and his score was not as great as it seemed.
v Then came to the real shocker. Ken’s subordinates confirmed
what his stories revealed: He was a poor manager, having a little positive impact on those who worked for him. They felt that little
responsibility had been delegated to them. He never rewarded them but only
criticized them. And the office was poorly organized, confused, and chaotic. On
all those scales, his office rated in the tenth to 15th percentile relative to
national norms.
v As Ken talked the results of the survey over privately
with a workshop leader, he became more and more upset. He finally agreed,
however, that the results confirmed feelings he had been afraid to admit to
himself or others. For years, he had been miserable in his managerial role. He
now knew the reason: He simply did not want, and he had not been able, to
influence or manage others. As he thought back, he realized he had failed every
time he had tried to influence his staff, and he felt worse than ever.
v Ken had responded to failure by setting very high
standards—his office scored in the 98th percentile on this scale—and by trying
to do most things himself, which was close to impossible. His own activity and
lack of delegation consequently left his staff demoralized. Ken’s experience is
typical of those who have a strong need to achieve but little desire for power.
They may become very successful salespeople and, as a consequence, maybe
promoted into managerial jobs for which they, ironically, are unsuited.
v If the need to achieve does not make a good manager, what
motive does? It is not enough to suspect that power motivation may be
important; one needs hard evidence that people who are better managers than Ken
Briggs is are in fact more highly motivated by power and perhaps score higher
in other characteristics as well. But how does one decide who is the better
manager?
v Real-world performance measures are hard to come by if
one is trying to rate managerial effectiveness in production, marketing,
finance, or research and development. In trying to determine who the better
managers were in Ken Briggs’s company, we did not want to rely only on their
superiors. For a variety of reasons, superiors’ judgments of their
subordinates’ real-world performance may be inaccurate. In the absence of some
standard measure of performance, we decided that the next best index of a
manager’s effectiveness would be the climate he or she creates in the office,
reflected in the morale subordinates.
v Almost by definition, a good manager is one who, among
other things, helps subordinates feel strong and responsible, rewards them
properly for good performance, and sees that things are organized so that
subordinates feel they know what they should be doing. Above all, managers
should foster among subordinates a strong sense of team spirit, of pride in
working as part of a team. If a manager creates and encourages this spirit, his
or her subordinates certainly should perform better.
v In the company Ken Briggs works for, we have direct
evidence of a connection between morale and performance in the one area where
performance measures are easy to find—namely, sales. In April 1973, at least three
employees from each of this company’s 16 sales districts filled out
questionnaires that rated their office for organizational clarity and team
spirit. Their scores were averaged and totaled to give an overall morale score
for each office. Then, the percentage of gains or losses in sales in 1973 were
compared with those for 1972 for each district. The difference in sales figures
by district ranged from a gain of nearly 30% to a loss of 8%, with a
median gain of about 14%. The graph “The Link Between Morale and Sales” shows
how, in Ken Briggs’s company at least, high morale at the beginning of the year
became a good index of how well the sales division would actually perform
throughout the year. Moreover, it seems likely that the manager who can create
high morale among salespeople can also do the same for employees in other areas
(production, design, and so on), which leads to better overall performance.
What characteristics, then, does a manager need to create that kind of morale?
v
v The Link Between Morale and Sales The higher the
morale early in the year, the higher the sales by year-end.
v The
Power Factor
v To find out, we surveyed more than 50 managers in both
high- and low-morale units in all sections of a single large company. We found
that the power motivation scores for most of the managers—more than 70%—were
higher than those of the average person. This finding confirms that power
motivation is important to management. (Remember that as we use the term,
“power motivation” refers not to dictatorial behavior but to a desire to have
an impact, to be strong and influential.) The better managers, as judged by the
morale of those working for them, tended to score even higher in power
motivation. But the most important determining factor of high morale turned out
to be not how their need for power compared with their need to achieve but
whether it was higher than their need to be liked. This relationship existed
for 80% of the better sales managers but for only 10% of the poorer
managers. And the same held true for other managers in nearly every part of the
organization.
v In the research, product development, and operations
divisions, 73% of the better managers had a stronger need for power than
need to be liked, as compared with only 22% of the poorer managers, who
tended to be what we term “affiliative managers”—whose strongest drive is to be
liked. Why should this be so?
v Sociologists have long argued that for a bureaucracy to
function effectively, those who manage it must apply rules universally: that
is, if they make exceptions for the particular needs of individuals, the whole
system will break down. The manager with a high need to be liked is precisely the
one who wants to stay on good terms with everybody and, therefore, is the one
most likely to make exceptions for particular needs. If an employee asks for
time off to stay home and look after a sick spouse and the kids, the
affiliative manager agrees almost without thinking, out of compassion for the
employee’s situation. When former President Gerald Ford remarked in pardoning
Richard Nixon that Nixon had “suffered enough,” he was responding as an
affiliative manager would because he was empathizing primarily with Nixon’s
needs and feelings.
v
The affiliative manager
wants to stay on good terms with everybody and, therefore, is the one most
likely to make exceptions for particular needs.
v Sociological theory and our findings both argue, however,
that the person whose need for affiliation is high does not make a good
manager. This kind of person creates low morale because he or she does not
understand that other people in the office will tend to regard exceptions to
the rules as unfair to themselves, just as many U.S. citizens felt that it was
unfair to let Nixon off and punish others who were less involved than he was in
the Watergate scandal.
v So far, our findings are a little alarming. Do they
suggest that a good manager is one who cares for power and is not at all
concerned about the needs of other people? Not quite, the good manager has
other characteristics that must still be taken into account. Above all, the
good manager’s power motivation is not oriented toward personal aggrandizement
but toward the institution that he or she serves.
v
Do our findings suggest
that a good manager is one who cares for power and is not at all concerned
about the needs of other people? Not quite.
v In another major research study, we found that the signs
of controlled action, or inhibition, that appear when a person exercises
imagination in writing stories tell a great deal about the kind of power that
person needs.1 We
discovered that if a high power motivation score is balanced by high
inhibition, stories about power tend to be altruistic. That is the heroes in
the story exercise power on behalf of someone else. This is the socialized face
of power, as distinguished from the concern for personal power, which is
characteristic of individuals whose stories are loaded with powerful imagery but
show no sign of inhibition or self-control. In our earlier study, we found
ample evidence that the latter individuals exercise their power impulsively.
They are more often rude to other people, they drink much, they try to exploit
others sexually, and they collect symbols of personal prestige such as fancy
cars or big offices.
v Individuals high in power and in control, on the other
hand, are more institution minded; they tend to get elected to more offices, to
control their drinking, and to have a desire to serve others. Not surprisingly,
we found in the workshops that the better managers in the corporation also tend
to score high on both power and inhibition.
v Three
Kinds of Managers
v Let us recapitulate what we have discussed so far and
have illustrated with data from one company. The better managers we
studied—what we call institutional managers—are high in power
motivation, low in affiliation motivation, and high in inhibition. They care
about institutional power and use it to stimulate their employees to be more
productive. Now let us compare them with affiliative managers (those
people for whom the need for affiliation is higher than the need for power) and
with the personal-power managers (those in whom the need for
power is higher than the need for affiliation but whose inhibition score is
low).
v In the sales division of the company we chose to use, as
an illustration, there are managers who match the three types fairly closely.
The chart “Which Manager Is Most Effective?” shows how their subordinates rated
the offices they worked in on responsibility, organizational clarity, and team
spirit. Managers who are concerned about being liked tend to have subordinates
who feel that they have little personal responsibility, believe that organizational
procedures are not clear, and have little pride in their workgroup. In short,
as we expected, affiliative managers make so many ad hominem and ad hoc
decisions that they almost totally abandon orderly procedures. Their disregard
for procedure leaves employees feeling weak, irresponsible, and without a sense
of what might happen next, of where they stand in relation to their manager, or
even of what they ought to be doing. In this company, the group of affiliative
managers portrayed in the chart falls below the 40th percentile in all three
measures of morale.
v
v Which Manager Is Most Effective? Subordinates of
managers with different motive profiles report different levels of
responsibility, organizational clarity, and team spirit.
v The managers who are motivated by a need for personal
power are somewhat more effective. They are able to engender a greater sense of
responsibility in their divisions and, above all, create a greater team spirit.
They can be thought of as managerial equivalents of successful tank commanders
such as General George Patton, whose own daring inspired admiration in his
troops. But notice how in the chart these people are still only around the 40th
percentile in the amount of organizational clarity they create, whereas the
institutional managers—the high-power, low-affiliation, high-inhibition
managers—score much higher.
v Managers motivated by personal power are not disciplined
enough to be good institution builders, and often their subordinates are loyal
to them as individuals rather than to the institution they serve. When a
personal-power manager leaves, disorganization often follows. The strong group
spirit that the manager has personally inspired deflates. The subordinates do
not know what to do by themselves.
v Of all the managerial types, the institutional manager is
the most successful in creating an effective work climate. Subordinates feel
that they have more responsibility. Also, those kinds of managers create high
morale because they produce the greatest sense of organizational clarity and
team spirit. If such a manager leaves, he or she can be more readily replaced
by another because the employees have been encouraged to be loyal to the
institution rather than to a particular person.
v
Institutional managers
create high morale because they produce the greatest sense of organizational
clarity and team spirit.
v Since it seems undeniable that a manager with a power orientation
creates better morale in subordinates than one with a people orientation, we
must consider that a concern for power is essential to good management.
v Our findings seem to fly in the face of a long and
influential tradition of organizational psychology, which insists that
authoritarian management is what is wrong with most businesses in the United
States. Let us say frankly that we think the bogeyman of authoritarianism has
been wrongly used to downplay the importance of power in management. After all,
management is an influence game. Some proponents of democratic management seem
to have forgotten this fact, urging managers to be more concerned with people’s
personal needs than with helping them to get things done.
v But much of the apparent conflict between our findings
and those of other behavioral scientists in this area stems from the fact that
we are talking about motives, and behaviorists are often
talking about actions. What we are saying is that managers must be
interested in playing the influence game in a controlled way. That does not
necessarily mean that they are or should be authoritarian in action. On the
contrary, it appears that power-motivated managers make their subordinates feel
strong rather than weak. The true authoritarian in action would have the
reverse effect, making people feel weak and powerless.
v Thus another important ingredient in the profile of a
manager is managerial style. In our example, 63% of the better managers
(those whose subordinates had higher morale) scored higher on the democratic or
coaching styles of management as compared with only 22% of the poorer
managers. By contrast, the latter scored higher on authoritarian or coercive
management styles. Since the better managers were also higher in power
motivation, it seems that in action they express their power motivation in a
democratic way, which is more likely to be effective.
v To see how motivation and style interact, consider the
case of George Prentice, a manager in the sales division another company.
George had exactly the right combination of motives to be an institutional
manager. He was high in the need for power, low in the need for affiliation,
and high in inhibition. He exercised his power in a controlled, organized way.
The stories he wrote reflected this fact. In one story, for instance, he wrote,
“The men sitting around the table were feeling pretty good; they had just
finished plans for reorganizing the company; the company has been beset with a
number of organizational problems. This group, headed by a hard-driving,
brilliant young executive, has completely reorganized the company structurally
with new jobs and responsibilities . . ..”
v This described how George himself was perceived by the
company, and shortly after the workshop, he was promoted to vice president in
charge of all sales. But George was also known to his colleagues as a monster,
a tough guy who would “walk over his grandmother” if she stood in the way of
his advancement. He had the right motive combination and, in fact, was more
interested in institutional growth than he was in personal power, but his
managerial style was all wrong. Taking his cue from some of the top executives
in the corporation, he told people what they had to do, and he threatened them
with dire consequences if they did not do it.
v When George was confronted with his authoritarianism in a
workshop, he recognized that this style was counter-productive—in fact, in
another part of the study we found that it was associated with low morale—and
he subsequently began to act more like a coach, which was the style for which
he scored the lowest, initially. George saw more clearly that his job was not
to force other people to do things but rather to help them figure out ways of
getting their jobs done better for the company.
v Profile
of the Institutional Manager
v One reason it was easy for George Prentice to change his
managerial style was that, as we saw in his imaginative stories, he was already
thinking about helping others—a characteristic of people with the
institution-building motivational pattern. In further examining institution
builders’ thoughts and actions, we found they have four major characteristics:
v Institutional managers are more organization minded; that
is, they tend to join more organizations and to feel responsible for building
up those organizations. Furthermore, they believe strongly in the importance of
centralized authority.
v They report that they like to work. This finding is
particularly interesting because our research on achievement motivation has led
many commentators to argue that achievement motivation promotes the Protestant
work ethic. Al-most the precise opposite is true. People who have a high need
to achieve like to reduce their work by becoming more efficient. They would
like to see the same result obtained in less time or with less effort. But
managers who have a need for institutional power actually seem to like the
discipline of work. It satisfies their need for getting things done in an
orderly way.
v They seem quite willing to sacrifice some of their own
self-interest for the welfare of the organization they serve.
v They have a keen sense of justice. It is almost as if
they feel that people who work hard and sacrifice for the good of the
organization should and will get a just reward for their effort.
v It is easy to see how each of these four characteristics
helps a person become a good manager, concerned about what the institution can
achieve.
v We discovered one more fact in studying the better
managers at George Prentice’s company. They were more mature. Mature people can
be most simply described as less egotistic. Somehow their positive self-image
is not at stake in their jobs. They are less defensive, more willing to seek
advice from experts, and have a longer-range view. They accumulate fewer
personal possessions and seem older and wiser. It is as if they have awakened
to the fact that they are not going to live forever and have lost some of the
feelings that their own personal future is all that important.
v Many U.S. businesspeople fear this kind of maturity. They
suspect that it will make them less hard-driving, less expansion-minded, and
less committed to organizational effectiveness. Our data do not support their
fears.
v Those fears are exactly the ones George Prentice had
before he went to the workshop. Afterward, he was a more effective manager, not
despite his loss of some of the sense of his own importance but because of it.
The reason is simple: His subordinates believed afterward that he was genuinely
more concerned about the company than he was about himself. Whereas once they
respected his confidence but feared him, they now trust him. Once, he supported
their image of him as a “big man” by talking about the new Porsche and Honda he
had bought; when we saw him recently, he said, almost as an aside, “I don’t buy
things anymore.”
v Altering
Managerial Style
v George Prentice was able to change his managerial style
after learning more about himself. But does self-knowledge generally improve
managerial behavior?
v Consider the results shown in the chart “Managers Can Change
Their Styles,” where employee morale scores are compared before and after their
managers attended workshop training. To judge by their subordinates’ responses,
the managers were clearly more effective after coming to terms with their
styles. The subordinates felt that they received more rewards, that the
organizational procedures were clearer, and that morale was higher.
v
v Managers Can Change Their Styles Training managers
clearly improves their employees’ morale.
v But what do those differences mean in human terms? How
did the managers change? Sometimes they decided they should get into another
line of work. This happened to Ken Briggs, for example, who found that the
reason he was doing so poorly as a manager was because he had almost no
interest in influencing others. He understood how he would have to change in
order to do well in his present job but in the end decided, with the help of
management, that he would prefer to work back into his first love, sales.
v Ken Briggs moved into remaindering, helping retail
outlets for his company’s products get rid of last year’s stock so that they
could take on each year’s new styles. He is very successful in this new role;
he has cut costs, increased dollar volume, and in time worked himself into an
independent role selling some of the old stock on his own in a way that is
quite satisfactory to the business. And he does not have to manage anybody
anymore.
v In George Prentice’s case, less change was needed. He
obviously was a very competent manager with the right motive profile for a top
company position. When he was promoted, he performed even more successfully
than he had previously because he realized that he needed to become more
positive in his approach and less coercive in his managerial style.
v But what about a person who does not want to change jobs
and discovers that he or she does not have the right motive profile to be a
manager? The case of Charlie Blake is instructive. Charlie was as low in power
motivation as Ken Briggs, his need to achieve was about average, and his
affiliation motivation was above average. Thus he had the affiliative manager
profile, and, as expected, the morale among his subordinates was very low. When
Charlie learned that his subordinates’ sense of responsibility and perception
of a reward system was in the tenth percentile and that team spirit was in the
30th, he was shocked. When shown a film depicting three managerial climates,
Charlie said he preferred what turned out to be the authoritarian climate. He
became angry when the workshop trainer and other members of the group pointed
out the limitations of this managerial style. He became obstructive to the group
process, and he objected strenuously to what was being taught.
v In an interview conducted much later, Charlie said, “I
blew my cool. When I started yelling at you for being all wrong, I got even
madder when you pointed out that, according to my style questionnaire, you bet
that that was just what I did to my salespeople. Down underneath, I knew
something must be wrong. The sales performance of my division wasn’t so good.
Most of it was due to me anyway and not to my sales-people. Obviously, their
reports that they felt I delegated very little responsibility to them and
didn’t reward them at all had to mean something. So I finally decided to sit
down and try to figure out what I could do about it. I knew I had to start being a
manager instead of trying to do everything myself and blowing my cool at others
because they didn’t do what I thought they should. In the end, after I calmed
down, on the way back from the workshop, I realized that it is not so bad to
make a mistake; it’s bad not to learn from it.”
v After the course, Charlie put his plans into effect. Six
months later, his subordinates were asked to rate him again. He attended a
second workshop to study the results and reported, “On the way home, I was
nervous. I knew I had been working with those guys and not selling so much
myself, but I was afraid of what they would say about how things were going in
the office. When I found out that the team spirit and some of those other low
scores had jumped from around the 30th to the 55th percentile, I was so
delighted and relieved that I couldn’t say anything all day long.”
v When he was asked how his behavior had changed, Charlie
said, “In previous years when corporate headquarters said we had to make 110% of
our original goal, I had called the salespeople in and said, in effect, ‘This
is ridiculous; we are not going to make it, but you know perfectly well what
will happen if we don’t. So get out there and work your tails off.’ The result
was that I worked 20 hours a day, and they did nothing.
v “This time I approached the sales-people differently. I
told them three things. First, they were going to have to do some sacrifice
for the company. Second, working harder is not going to do much good because we
are already working about as hard as we can. What will be required are special
deals and promotions. You are going to have to figure out some new angles if we
are to make it. Third, I’m going to back you up. I’m going to set a realistic
goal with each of you. If you make that goal but don’t make the company goal,
I’ll see to it that you are not punished. But if you do make the company goal,
I’ll see to it that you will get some kind of special rewards.”
v The salespeople challenged Charlie, saying he did not
have enough influence to give them rewards. Rather than becoming angry, Charlie
promised rewards that were in his power to give—such as longer vacations.
v Note that Charlie has now begun to behave in a number of
ways that we found to be characteristic of the good institutional manager. He
is, above all, higher in power motivation—the desire to influence his
salespeople—and lower in his tendency to try to do everything himself. He asks
people to sacrifice for the company. He does not defensively chew them out when
they challenge him but tries to figure out what their needs are so that he can
influence them. He realizes that his job is more of strengthening and
supporting his subordinates than of criticizing them. And he is keenly
interested in giving them just rewards for their efforts.
v The changes in his approach to his job have certainly
paid off. The sales for his office in 1973 were more than 16% higher than
those of the previous year, and they rose still further in 1974. In 1973, his
office’s gain over the previous year ranked seventh in the nation; in 1974, it
ranked third. And he wasn’t the only one in his company to change managerial
styles. Overall sales at his company were up substantially in 1973, an increase
that played a large part in turning the overall company performance around from
a $15 million loss in 1972 to a $3 million profit in 1973. The
company continued to improve its performance in 1974 with a further 11% gain
in sales and a 38% increase in profits.
v Of course, everybody can’t always be reached by a
workshop. Henry Carter managed a sales office for a company that had very low
morale (around the 20th percentile) before he went for training. When morale
was checked some six months later, it had not proved. Overall sales gains
subsequently reflected this fact—only 2% above the previous year’s
figures.
v Oddly enough, Henry’s problem was that he was so well-liked by everybody he felt little pressure to change. Always the life of the
party, he was particularly popular because he supplied other managers with
special hard-to-get brands of cigars and wines at a discount. He used his close
ties with everyone to bolster his position in the company, even though it was
known that his office did not perform as well as others.
v His great interpersonal skills became evident at the
workshop when he did very poorly at one of the business games. When the
discussion turned to why he had done so badly and whether he acted that way on
the job, two prestigious participants immediately sprang to his defense,
explaining away Henry’s failure by arguing that the way he did things was often
a real help to others and the company. As a result, Henry did not have to cope
with such questions at all. He had so successfully developed his role as a
likable, helpful friend to everyone in management that, even though his
salespeople performed badly, he did not feel under any pressure to change the
way he managed people.
v What have we learned from Ken Briggs, George Prentice,
Charlie Blake, and Henry Carter? We have discovered what motives make an
effective manager—and that change is possible if a person has the right
combination of qualities.
v Oddly enough, the good manager in a large company does
not have a high need for achievement, as we define and measure that motive,
although there must be plenty of that motive somewhere in his or her
organization. The top managers shown here have a need for a power greater than
their interest in being liked. The manager’s concern for power should be
socialized—controlled so that the institution as a whole, not only the
individual, benefits. People and nations with this motive profile are empire
builders; they tend to create high morale and to expand the organizations they
head. But there is also danger in this motive profile; as in countries, empire-building can lead to imperialism and authoritarianism in companies. The same
motive pattern that produces good power management can also lead a company to
try to dominate others, ostensibly in the interests of organizational
expansion. Thus it is not surprising that big business has had to be regulated
periodically by federal agencies.
v Similarly, the best managers possess two characteristics
that act as regulators—a greater emotional maturity, where there is little
egotism, and a democratic, coaching managerial style. If a manager’s
institutional power motivation is checked by maturity, it does not lead to an
aggressive, egotistic expansiveness. That means managers can control their
subordinates and influence others around them without having to resort to coercion
or to an authoritarian management style.
v Summarized in this way, what we have found out through
empirical and statistical investigations may sound like good common sense. But
it is more than common sense; now we can say objectively what the characteristics
of a good manager are. Managers of corporations can select those who are
likely to be good managers and train those already in managerial positions to
be more effective with more confidence.
v David C. McClelland, William N. Davis, Rudolf Kalin, and
Eric Wanner, The Drinking Man: Alcohol and Human Motivation (Free
Press, 1972).
v A version of this article appeared in January
2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.
v The late David C. McClelland was
a professor of psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in
1976 when this article first appeared.
v David H. Burnham was at that time
the president and chief executive officer of McBer & Company, a behavioral
science consulting firm. He is currently a principal of the Burnham Rosen
Group, a strategic consulting and leadership-training firm in Boston.
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